Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan

Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan

14.0027.95

Starstruck: Photographs from a Fan unearths a spectacular photographic archive from one of the most obsessively devoted fans of our time, Gary Lee Boas. Starting in 1966 at the age of fifteen, Boas would convince his mother to drive him from his home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia and New York City, where he would wait outside theaters, parties and restaurants in hopes of photographing famous people. With his instamatic camera, he captured everyone from silver-screen goddesses and Broadway legends to forgotten local beauty queens, rock stars, politicians, porn stars and even the pope.

Alongside these candid, never-before-seen images, are Boas’s humorous, and sometimes shocking observations about his interactions with these stars.

The photographs and stories, of Starstruck, date from 1966 to 1980. They document a bygone era of glamour, fandom, and pre-paparazzi innocence.

Co-curated by Cheryl Dunn, Hedi El Kholti and Jodi Wille.

“Starstruck unexpectedly celebrates the beauty of the amateur-one whose vocation is not driven by a hunger for money, but by love. The book is a breath of fresh air.”- Warren Beatty

The intensity of the star moment captured by one of the great fans…in all its discombobulating glory…

– David Rimanelli, Artforum

"Remarkable...compulsively absorbing."— Ken Johnson, The New York Times. – Ken Johnson, The New York Times

“Gary Boas is the superhero of fans everywhere…Fascinating…” –USA Weekend

“Really fabulous…I could not put it down. I didn’t expect it would be such a great read, as well as, of course, being a profound social and cultural document.” – Ken Copeland, writer for Wired

“Starstruck is a time capsule, a portal to a bygone era, and Boas is its time machine, a combination of George Hurrell and Lee Friedlander, armed with an instamatic. What makes his collection of vintage snaps so poignant and fascinating, aside from its sheer volume, is the fact that they are moments in time that can never be recaptured, postcards from a lost world, shards of a reality that no longer exists. It is no longer possible to be merely a fan, anymore than it is possible to be only a star. Boas remembers when it was as simple as asking, ‘May I take your picture, please?’ and he’s got a book to prove it.” – Larry Schubert, Flaunt